Editor's Note: This is an expanded version of the story that appears in our September issue of DV magazine.
A Human Processing Unit trapped in her cell. The image projected by the screen array depicts what her probe sees on Earth.
When writer-director Dan Trezise set out to make his 12-minute science-fiction film Outsource, he knew he didn’t want to do a stereotypical indie, guerrilla-style short. Trezise, who has worked as a digital compositor on feature projects ranging from The Matrix Revolutions to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou to The Golden Compass, wanted his movie to instead be as close to a full-on Hollywood-style production as he could manage.
The resulting film, which cost approximately $180,000, took three days to shoot and three years to post — three years —because every one of the 185 shots in the movie, with a single exception, is a visual effects shot.
Outsource is set in a futuristic world in which menial tasks are performed by floating robotic probes. Rather than relying on some advanced artificial intelligence, however, the devices are actually controlled by human beings — Human Processing Units — enslaved in a hive-like structure orbiting Earth. Each HPU is tethered to a a satellite orb that anchors them to the center of their cell. Clasped to their head it is both their life support and master. The HPUs remotely operate their probes on Earth by their own motions and mental commands. Their linked probes broadcasts a POV image back to the HPU’s cell to be displayed across dozens of video monitors that make up the walls of their cells. Although these cells are part of an enormous construct, the slaves within each are totally unaware of their lot in life — until one male (Judson Pierce Morgan) accidentally glimpses a reflection of the female (Kelly Overton) in the cell next to his and realizes their dire predicament.
As a visual effects veteran, Trezise (left) chose to put most of his budget into production, not relying on freebies or favors. “I can survive a long post,” he says. “I’ve done that time and time again in my career. But because the production was going to be so technically complex, I needed to make sure that everyone would be on their game.” Trezise called on producer Brady Nasfell of Sodium Entertainment to help recruit the right cast and crew.
An early pre-production illustration of the HPU cells.
A pre-production illustration of the two HPUs finally making contact.
To create the futuristic suits worn by the two humans in the cells, Trezise turned to Jose Fernandez, whose credits include costume designer on X2 and costume sculptor on Hellboy. Fernandez used the same techniques he would have used to create a superhero suit, taking body casts of the two actors, then building form-fitting rubber suits for them. The costumes and props were major expenses for the production, costing roughly $40,000, but also set the bar for the production value Trezise would later strive to maintain.
An early design of the HPU costume, the headgear built for the suit and Jose Fernandez checking the costume's fit on actor Judson Pierce Morgan.
The costumes were designed with post in mind. Trezise shot the two actors suspended on wires against black instead of traditional green screen. Trezise explains, “I worked out a method of keying off of black that gives me much better results than keying off of green.”
Trezise asked Fernandez to design the suits so they would have very few dark features, to achieve the greatest contrast between the characters and the black background they would be shooting against. Additionally Fernandez carved grooves into the surface of the costumes, then painted the bottom of the grooves green, so that the effects artists would later be able to pull a key on them and add a pulsing energy wave effect. Finally, Fernandez incorporated a highly reflective material that would create a third keyable feature when illuminated by a donut light attached to the lens of the camera. In the end, Trezise hade three separate keys: black for keying the characters, green integrated into the costumes, and from the reflective material.
Wearing a cap (center), Trezise directs while setting up for the studio portion of the shoot.
Trezise and cameraman Ken Glassing chose to shoot Outsource with the Thomson/Grass Valley Viper, capturing directly to hard drives in the camera’s FilmStream mode. “We chose the Viper because because it had the greatest range,” explains Trezise. “Other systems have a sharp falloff to black and to white, but I needed a soft falloff in both the blacks and whites in order to get the keying results I wanted in post.” The Viper’s completely digital tapeless pipeline also offered him a smooth transition from production into post. Once production had wrapped, Trezise created QuickTime movies with frame numbers, rather than time code, because he knew that would be a better way to lay the groundwork for the compositing in Apple Shake.
Trezise began by creating a picture edit in Final Cut Pro, working with half-res proxies in the Pixlet codec, an Apple codec designed by Pixar.
A half-res proxie frame.
“This was a hard film to cut,” says Trezise, who turned to editor Natalie Ebnet for help. “You would think the effects would have been the most challenging thing, but, really, the edit was.” He explains that because the movie contains so many effects, it was almost impossible for people to watch the cut and understand what was going on.
In any shot of the HPUs in the cells, the finished frame includes not only the person in their suit, with pulsating veins, but also a virtual set of the room around them and its video screens, all showing the POV of what their linked probe is seeing on Earth. But what people were looking at in the cut was generally an actor in an inert suit, hanging against a black background. Moreover, the sound design for the movie is also very elaborate, so even when the visual effects were done and added to the cut, there was still no breathing or electric zapping or any other auditory clues about what was going on. “Aaron Sullivan and I took an Eisenstein-like constructionist approach when we designed Outsource. We wanted every frame of the film to speak to the next,” says Trezise. “As a testament to that style, there is no dialogue — there are just cuts and reactions to tell the story.”
Once he committed to a cut, Trezise could begin the visual effects — having done as much as he could ahead of time to make the process easier for himself.
One of Trezise’s biggest directorial choices was to make every outdoor shot a lock-off, so he could quickly shoot a clean plate immediately after the final take. He would later use these clean plates in post to hide elements of the shots that he needed to remove from the frame. “You can do almost anything you want if you get a clean plate lock-off,” he says. “This film is almost all lock-offs, but it doesn’t feel like that.” This approach also enabled Trezise and Glassing to efficiently push through a great number of setups.
Having clean plates was particularly critical for the Earth-set scenes — where the probes are operating for their “masters” — because, on set, each “floating” device was attached to a pole, painted red to separate it more clearly from the background, and operated by a puppeteer; the pole and puppeteer both had to be removed from every shot that featured a probe. In post, the visual effect team used rotoscoped splits between the hero plate and the clean plate to create the final composites of the free-floating probes.
Shooting the Earth-set sequence with a puppeteered prop — in this case a wayward drone that is supposed to be "walking" a pair of dogs.
Trezise chose to shoot the probes as puppeteered props rather than use computer animation because he knew the virtual sets of the HPU cells were going to require most of his post resources. He also felt the performances and interaction of the actors with real props and puppeteers would be more organic and genuine than if he used animated probes.
Shooting a drone against black for later compositing.
Producer Brady Nasfell checks out the Thomson/Grass Valley Viper camera.
A puppeteer operates the probe while the character attempts to “reset” the device.
Trezise demonstrates the action for a probe POV shot.
In a completed effects shot — with the red puppeteering handles removed — two floating HPU probes make first contact.
As they began work on the interior of the space prison facility and its elaborate cells, Trezise designed the template for how the complex composites would work.
Of the 185 shots in the movie, 120 take place in low-gravity prison cells. Isolated in 12” cubed cells made of video screens, the HPUs are continually blocked from viewing neighboring prisoners by a video image broadcast from Earth, however, just outside their field of view, the video screens are inactive and clear —revealing their plight. “The first thing I would need to determine was, what is the character in the cube looking at?” recalls Trezise. “Once I decided, I brought the footage into Shake and applied effects as a pre-baked texture.”
The space prison facility, demonstrating the complexity of the "video screen" construction.
To make each video monitor in a wall look different, he created a 12x12 grid the size of the wall, with one square in the grid representing each monitor in the wall. He then assigned a different color — red, green, blue, cyan, yellow or magenta — to each square, so that there were never two adjacent squares the same color. He could then use channel mapping to apply different effects — such as flickers, noise and scan lines — to the various color squares, so that all the red squares would have one combination of effects, all the green ones another set, and so on.
Effects artist Jay Lalime used Autodesk Maya to create the vibrant virtual sets of the HPU prison cells. Although the modeling was pretty straightforward he had to consider a difficult lighting scenario. The first thing he would do is assign Trezise’s video textures to the appropriate walls to create the POV broadcast from the HPU’s linked Earth probe. Where the cell walls were not displaying video there would be clear glass. This meant he had to build a means of having lighting contribution from neighboring cells spill into each other. Additionally, everything in each cell had to reflect properly on the glass screens. Lalime used the video screen textures again for this reflection pass. He also created reflections of the characters floating in their cubes images of the HPUs placed on a planes in the center of the cell and rendered separately for each wall. Trezise also needed Lalime to render interactive lighting passes for the scenes where the characters were being zapped with electricity.
Most of the shots in the space prison required two cells to be rendered at full HD resolution. Lalime chose to do multipass rendering to speed up the render times as well as minimize rerendering in the event that something wasn’t right. Each hero cell was comprised of 32 multipass layers that were reassembled in the composite. This gave the compositors the needed flexibility to place the characters into the scene. Lalime had the added task of creating all the secondary cells that could be seen beyond the main characters. To speed render times he created lower resolution versions of the distant cells and combined them into groups of cells, simplifying them to four multipass layers for each group. Throughout the film this detail reveals the scope of the space prison facility.
While Lalime managed months of endless renders, Trezise worked on compositing the characters, perfecting their keys, applying the energy effect to their suits and placing them into Lalime virtual sets. With the core composites built Trezise and Sullivan added the final touches. They tracked computer text onto the personal feedback monitors attached to the HPUs head gear. Metallic eye shields were added to a couple key shots. Finally, Sullivan contributed hand-painted electric shocks and fluid dripping from the life support attachment.
Once the effects were completed, Trezise turned to the audio department to bring Outsource alive. He looked to Neil Uchitel to provided a detailed and dense sound design that created unique spaces for each cell and the Earth-set. Uchitel had the added challenge in a dialogue-free film to fill the empty pallet with the right selection of sounds to create the science fiction world as well as emphasize the performances. In the end a lot of the details of the film are only conveyed as a result of Uchitel’s sound design. Trezise took the more than 100 tracks of audio Uchitel provided and combined it with a purposely subtle score by Scott Clausen and Christopher A. Lee.
Outsource was completed with a 5.1 surround theatrical mix at ToddAO and final color timing at Modern VideoFilm.
To date, Outsource has played in more than 30 festivals. For Trezise, who is making the transition to writing and directing with this project, it’s more than just a short film. “The movie was designed to push me in all the ways I’d been developing,” he says. “It’s been a huge learning experience. Through the various screenings, Outsource has had, I’m excited to see that it not only impresses audiences visually and audibly, but emotionally as well. That is my greatest thrill as a director.”